Borgesian Fabulation [Making Peace With The Story of Your Life]

If you knew, before you lived it, what the Story of Your Life would be—every loss, heartache, trial, and misfortune—would you still decide to live it? Knowing that nothing that fell within those pages was within your ability to omit or alter, could you commit yourself, to the entirety, of your self?

It is an age old question of fate vs free will, coupled by existential exercises of liminal reality that asks us to set aside our cognitive dissonance around mortality and the ultimate query of, “why?”. Answered not with purpose or meaning-making, but with something deeper, and unshakable.

One of my final creative projects for grad school, I’ve stumbled back into, as I am still uncertain of what I might choose, if given the chance. Of what I am able to accept. Of what I still remain in defiance of.

It is a meditation on Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”, a wrestling with Fate, and the retelling of a reoccurring dream I had over the course of years—about a woman, who had a child, that she loved deeply, and even with the unchangeable future looming, still chose love.

Because you deserve to love. And you deserve to live.